Promoting television shows - be it reality or drama or even comedy for that matter - is really serious business. Especially in a cluttered television space that is vying for audiences glued to their favourite programs. Viacom18 owned Comedy Central India, the Indian version of Comedy Central devoted to catering to our constant need to laugh, launched a social media game for the second season of its legal comedy drama series ‘Suits’.

The objectives were twofold:

To capitalize on the show’s wide appeal and provide a refresher to audiences before the second season

Comedy Central reaches an affluent, internet savvy audience. The average viewer is a working professional whose television viewing time is fairly limited.

Campaign Details:

How we achieved our outcome, including creative & media communication strategies and execution.

Comedy Central created conversations around Suits through a “Suits challenge”. It tested die-hard fans of the show to find out if they have what it takes to be a real Suitor. It used an innovative approach of creating a treasure hunt across the web. Fans needed to hunt for clues across social media – spanning Comedy Central’s gamut of properties – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. Fans needed to watch a video on YouTube to complete a quote, find a hint on Pinterest image board or tweet with a hashtag #IfIWereJessica to @comedycentralin. In true Comedy Central spirit fans also needed to research funny laws and odd facts to complete the game.

The game consisted of six levels and with six questions around the six key characters thereby increasing familiarity and recall. Participation was further incentivized with exclusive custom made Suits merchandise.

The game was marketed through a mix of television and on-line promotions. And the fans loved it. Over 50,000 participants signed up to test their “Suits Quotient” giving us 308,000 page views and 199,160 unique views. A fairly healthy bounce rate of 30% proved that audiences were engaging with the content.

Results:

Comedy Central used a unique technology of weaving different social media platforms into a single game creating a truly platform agnostic experience. The application was integrated with Facebook and Twitter allowing fans to sign in and post and tweet without leaving the gaming interface.

Another tricky element from a technology point of view was creating the mechanics of a Treasure Hunt. Fans could only move forward if each question was answered correctly. While they could keep trying again and again they were only eligible to win if they got all the questions right in their first try. This means that the backend needed to differentiate between users with single tries and users with multiple tries and throw up a unique “result page” for each category. This fed back into the campaign strategy of separating the true Suits fans from the others, while still keeping all participants engaged up to the end.

The final question - did this campaign succeed in driving audiences to Suits Season 2? The answer is a resounding yes. Social media conversations around the show increased and the show hashtag #SuitsS2onCC trended in India.